Eight Prison Doors
by catherwauling
Summary: In which the jinchūriki of the Kyūbi no Kitsune is the picture of the perfect kunoichi. (Fem!Naruto as a weapon of war. Lots of people die, and things don't get better.)
1. Chapter 1

**AN:** This is probably going to update hardly ever, because my life is a (dis)honest mess and this fic is awkwardly written, mopey wish-fulfillment at the very best. I don't own Naruto.

* * *

- **1** -

He didn't make a mistake. The seal was as close to perfect as something of its nature could be.

A prison with a door is always fragile—

Like an orphan girl's love for her nameless father, when she's met with a monster that knows the truth can be as dangerous a weapon as any well-intentioned lie.

-x-

The mother, before she even knew she was with child, wanted to name her firstborn after her first home. As long as Uzushiogakure lived on in memory, beyond its bloated corpse by the coast, then perhaps—

The father, newly appointed Hokage, is briefed by the Konoha Council on covert actions the village's black ops took during the two most recent Shinobi Wars. As the Yellow Flash, he's known his share of bloodshed; he's infamous throughout the continent for singlehandedly taking hundreds of lives over the course of single battles. One councilmember, in particular, thinks little of disclosing Konohagakure's dirtiest secrets to a war veteran with the Yondaime's body count, regardless of his dalliance with the Uzumaki girl.

When the parents pick out names for their future child, the husband steers his wife away from mementoes of storms and whirlpools. "Konoha is the only home she'll ever know," he says. "I want her to look forward to peace, not back to war."

(Uzumaki Kushina never wondered why Konoha failed to come to Uzushio's defence; the Sandaime himself had taken her aside to give her the village's regrets. The nations were preparing for conflict, and Konoha could not leave itself short of soldiers for as long as it would have taken to keep a constant watch on their strongest ally. News of Uzushio's destruction came before they could send troops to prevent its destruction. For this crime against their sister-village—and for their failure to protect it—Konoha would go to war.)

They decide to name their daughter Moriko, after the Hashirama trees that surround their home.

Namikaze Minato takes his secrets to the grave.


	2. Chapter 2

**AN:** I have neither a queue nor a beta; there's an outline, but no schedule.

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- **2** -

It's always been difficult for her, to be human.

She tries her best, but it's never enough; on the eleventh of every month after her sixth birthday, she's taken to the hospital and put under, waking to a burning in her stomach and the bitter scent of hidden fear.

The Sandaime often visits her at the hospital, sitting by her bedside with an expression that would be inscrutable to her were it not for her preternatural sense of smell. She does not know what she's done to make him frustrated and sad and afraid (for her, which is such a distinct sensation it's what sticks out the most). She thinks he's aging faster than he should; fancies she can see the crevices in his skin deepen by the ever-silent minute.

Uzumaki Moriko may not be very good at being a person, but she thinks it's unusual for him to just sit there, not a word said, as if she was a bad dream he didn't want to forget.

(Later, she'd think back, and realize she was more like a gravestone than she was ever a dream.)

-x-

Moriko is nine years old and living by herself in a one-room apartment in the Shinobi district, close enough to the Academy to walk there in less than twenty minutes at civilian pace. She has no neighbours on her floor—there used to be a chūnin that lived next door, but she'd seen him move out a while ago, his shoulders lined with discomfort as he worked himself up to say something, and failed—so it is quiet, save for the occasional footfalls of the ninja that cross the rooftop on their way to and back from the Hokage Tower.

She doesn't like the quiet very much—it reminds a buried part of her of something deep and endless, a place with neither light nor echoes save for the veiled sparks of distant stars—so she tries to fill it, as much as she can. She reads out her Academy homework aloud and always keeps the window open during market hours in the evenings; talks herself to sleep about the way the Hashirama trees sing to the _thing_ inside of her, and wakes to strange words on the tip of her tongue that are caught by pointed teeth.

Sometimes, she is unsettled by the strangeness of her voice. It's the same voice she's always had but— _like a missing echo, or the veiled light she sees beneath her eyelids_ —there's something that should be there, that's not. (Or— _not quite yet_ , she thinks, unbidden, and soon ignored.) It gives her a headache, that strangeness, in those off days, in which she seems entirely too small even though she's only nine.

She's not far enough in the Academy to have learned about ninja techniques, but she knows more than she's supposed to. For instance—she can do odd things with her hair when she's upset, even after the matron at her old orphanage sheared off most of it. It's not long enough to grab things or bludgeon her year-mates anymore, but it still gives off the tell-tale heat of chakra whenever it gets— _distracted_.

So it's a simple thing, for her, to _wish_ and _will_ and taste ash and cinders in her throat as words from her textbook ( _a ninja must never show emotion_ ) are spoken in Suzume-sensei's voice, as if her futon is a carpet in the grass during one of her kunoichi lessons, held outdoors for good weather.

It's not much better, in those off-days when her joints are wrong and her limbs are _too short_ and half of her is _gone, gone nowhere_ —but it's something, she supposes—

( _It's not enough_.)

-x-

The jinchūriki of the Kyūbi first meets her captive on the night of her tenth birthday, clutching at the kunai that a one-armed chūnin thrust into her stomach with a steady hand.

She wonders, as all her senses are taken from her but for the vertigo of a long fall down an impossible height, what happened to the masked man that was watching her from a distance earlier in the evening. She thinks she knows; halfway during her walk back home from the training ground closest to the Academy, something like a weight on her back had lifted, and it'd felt a bit like losing a coat during a cold spell.

Moriko is young, and her old matron called her a demon as she beat her, and the Sandaime looks at her like she's already dead, just a walking corpse grown familiar out of bad habit. She's young, and sometimes during Umino-sensei's lectures she thinks she knows more than she should, but she keeps her head down and her hands fisted under the desk, because the man smells tired and angry and doesn't like to call on her for anything. In short: she's young, but she can't help but remember the look in the chūnin's eyes as he bled her and feel like she's much, much older than she should be.

So when she looks up, finds she has something of a body again (eyes, ears, scents, the taste of copper, the weight of brackish water), and meets an actual demon, stuffed in a cage that's bigger than any of the buildings in Konoha, she's—

 _You are not surprised._

No, she thinks. Not as much as I should be.

It's difficult for her, to parse the demon's voice; it rings both in the walls and in her head, and it doesn't take long for her to realize it feels like she's the one that's hissing. It's too close to _something_ for her to be an echo, or a chorus, or anything _other than_ her own tongue, teeth, spit. There's a paper tag in the center of the bars, too high up for her to reach ( _from this side_ ), but not too far for her to see that the design on it is matted with something brown and black, like very old blood.

She wishes, irrationally, that it wasn't so difficult for her to hold a conversation with the angry, giant, nine-tailed monster that just appeared in front of her as if that's a thing that actually happens in her life. (She'd have thought herself dead, bled out from the gaping hole in her stomach through which she could vaguely make out her insides, but she could _feel_ the fox demon bat the notion away with sheer disdain. So she was likely—unconscious? Still bleeding, collapsed in the corner of the derelict building the chūnin had brought her to, utterly defenceless?) Her priorities are as messed up as her shirt, and the dissonance in her head isn't as painful as it usually is, and if she was trying to imitate her classmates she really would be concerned about what she's certain is the Kyūbi no Kitsune baring its teeth at her. She'd be screaming, and crying, making much more noise than she ever actually does, because meeting a demon face-to-face was supposed to be terrifying and also bad.

But—

It's always been difficult for her, to be human. She tries her best, but keeps falling short; she takes her cues from her classmates as often as she just moves her face around until the person yelling at her seems satisfied. The Sandaime has long stopped coming to see her on her birthday, and the last time she woke up in the hospital, the fūinjutsu specialist asked her more about her plants than about pains in her tenketsu. The last time she tried to talk to one of the girls during kunoichi classes, she'd stumbled over words she'd heard the Yamanaka heiress say to a pink-haired civilian child, and Suzume-sensei had taken her aside and smiled down at her like she was a misplaced doll.

So as the demon fox snarls at her, pokes and prods her with words both bitter and honeyed, she clutches the hole in her stomach and tries her best to listen, to make out what it is saying over what she's thinking, eyes wandering from teeth to claws to the ruined paper tag. She listens, and when the Kyūbi thrusts the truth of her heritage, of her origins as a jinchūriki, like a blade through her heart—

She can't help but think the demon missed the mark.


End file.
